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I honestly think I'm a sociopath sometimes. I just don't seem to be phased by a lot of things that really upset other people.

I went to see 12 Years A Slave with some friends. I was the only one in the theater not crying at the end of it. Watching the flogging or lynching scenes didn't upset me at all. We had planned on getting drinks after the movie and my friends were all saying they didn't know if they could just go grab drinks after a movie like that. I didn't understand that at all, I was totally down to go grab drinks and chat with friends. The movie had no lasting effects on me whatsoever.

I was on reddit and reading the thread about disturbing things that have been shown on live television. I was watching this video of Budd Dwyer committing suicide (NSFW) and a couple of my housemates walked by and asked what I was watching so I showed them. They were horrified and so disturbed. I just watched it, felt nothing, continued on to the next video. A few minutes later my housemate said "I can't believe we just actually sat there and watched that man commit suicide..." like he was emotionally destroyed from it. I had no idea what he was talking about, I'd watched like 3 more suicide videos already and wasn't giving any of them a second thought.

My friend mentioned once that one of their biggest fears is to witness someone die in person. I didn't understand, I can't imagine seeing someone die and thinking much of it unless they were someone close to me or it just as easily could have been me who had died (in which case I would be more afraid of my own mortality and not disturbed by someone else's death)

Those are just three recent examples from off the top of my head, I realized I am way less affected by things than most people a while ago. I don't know if I've just been desensitized or what but I'm just not easily disturbed. I don't like gory movies or anything like that either, they make me physically uncomfortable but it takes a lot to make me emotionally uncomfortable or disturbed. I dont know, it worries me sometimes but I guess there's not much I can do about it.

My little sister has auditory processing disorder. So she hears R's as W's and thus says R's as W's. She was in speech therapy for years with no improvement until finally she was diagnosed and could get help from someone who specialized in that kind of thing.

People didn't often comment on her speech or anything, but she was super self conscious about it. She would try and avoid saying words with R's in them, worried about meeting new people, etc. So I think she had problems making friends but it was kinda self inflicted. She has fixed her speech issues now, the W noise only comes out when she's really tired now. But I think her speech was a huge source of self esteem issues in middle school and high school.

I always thought that saying "It's better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all" was just some romantic bullshit. Until I fell in love. I got my heart ripped open and shit on but the way I felt those few months (I'd known the guy for years) before all the pain was like nothing I'd ever felt before. Despite how much sadness it caused me I wouldn't take back knowing how love feels for anything.

I used to be really stable, I had really good control over all my emotions and could logically work out anything I was feeling. In fact almost to the point that people would poke fun at me for not caring about anything ever. But these last two years have been really hard. My boyfriend cheated on me with my housemate, I got my heart completely broken for the first time by one of my most beloved friends and we are no longer speaking (separate from the cheating, different guy), got sexually assaulted a few months later, then had another guy not take my rejecting him well and drunkenly call/text me multiple times over a period of a couple weeks to call me horrible names and then act completely normal when he saw me in person (we unfortunately had a class together).

I still hang out with my ex boyfriend and my old housemate, which causes me endless amounts of misery but I can't imagine just cutting them out of my life. I am reduced to tears pretty much every time I get hit on, especially if the guy is pushy or wont back down. I have horrific trust issues. It's so illogical sounding but I can't shake the feeling that every guy I meet who is interested in me is just going to rape me if I turn them down. I don't trust that my friends care about me even when they tell me they do and go out of their way to see me/help me if I'm having a hard time. I have gone from being an overly stable and controlled person to having no handle on my own emotions and being terrified that everyone is going to hurt me. It's really scary to watch myself disintegrate and not know how to stop it.

I went to New Zealand with a girl I met on exchange, we're both American but I like to think I'm self aware enough not to be a raging stereotype. She also likes to think this, especially since she's Israeli (but moved to the US when she was 5), but she is the most American person I've ever met in my life. We're in the plane chatting and I swear to god she was .1 decibels under yelling at the top of her lungs. I could see half the people near us turning around and staring with disgust, and I was just talking quieter and quieter while slumping down in my seat and trying to end the conversation to stop the judgements. Finally some guy in front of us turned around and told her to shut up and then she got all huffy like he was being rude. That may have been the most publicly embarrassing thing I've ever experienced.

My dad's company that he started himself is going under, he is probably going to have to sell it for not much in the coming months. When he told me that I had the horrifying realization that my dad is not some god-like creature who knows the right answer to everything. It was strange having that image of him shatter and see that he is just a person like I am who is essentially flying by the seat of his pants and hoping everything works out.

When I started having panic attacks after high school I had trouble being out and about for long, so I eventually had to tell people I was having major anxiety. I had no idea so many other people suffered from anxiety and depression until I started being open about my psychological issues. Really opened up my eyes and made me realize people can act happy but they all have issues they're dealing with too.

Being sexually assaulted about 7 months ago was the lowest. Could barely leave my house or talk to anyone for weeks.
Highest was probably about a month or two ago through to now, I met some great new friends, was in therapy for the sexual assault, just overall doing really well!

My old room mate had PTSD from being in the tsunami in Chile. When the one year anniversary came around, and then shortly after the tsunami in Japan, she was an absolute wreck. I remember she had a nightmare one night, she woke up at about 4am screaming and I ran over and just held her and kept telling her she was ok while she cried and cried. When she had calmed down enough to talk she told me about how she didn't eat more than a couple pieces of bread for 3 days because any food she got she gave to her little cousin, and she talked about how terrified she was and how her father's family lost everything they owned that day except for the car they escaped in. By the end of the night I was crying too while we just held each other and I kept telling her everything was ok now. It was one of the most intense emotional things I've been through with someone and even though she's about a year older than me I grew to be pretty protective over her after that.

I thought it was very clear that the whole tiger thing was just an analogy he was using to lessen the blow of the unhappy fact that we're all just animals capable of doing horrible things to survive. But I saw it with friends and at the end one goes "Wow, which do you think was true? I think it was the tiger story that was the real one." And everyone agreed and I was just sitting there thinking "Have a made friends with a bunch of morons or am I just too cynical and negative?" But I love stories that comment on human nature, like Lord of the Flies is one of my favorite books ever. I was actually thinking "This movie is beautiful but the premise is weirdly childish with this guy befriending a tiger" and was much more satisfied once it was established/proposed that it was all just a made up story to cover up what really happened.

I had a friend ask me about 20 times to go to her bible study with her, I had already been atheist for a while and didn't want to go but my mom made me. I was so uncomfortable the whole time, and they'd keep asking me what I thought about each passage and if I feel God's love and I'd try to be honest but not offensive... They stopped inviting me after the 3rd time.

I got lost in a park near my house yesterday and my 2 hour stroll turned into a 5 hour adventure of trying to figure out where a bridge was to get back across the river. I was absolutely dying at the end of it (though it was also summer in Australia and I hadn't eaten in hours since I didn't think I'd be out that long). I can't even fathom a 16 hour nonstop hike...

I only aim for the meaty upper arm area and give them fair warning to prepare themselves for the impact, so often times I end up with a sore hand and they are laughing at me. And I'm sure they're acting like it hurts less than it did cause manly-man reasons but still, I am truly a little weakling.

I have had some really shitty friends the last couple years, I've been abroad for the last 10 months though and met some awesome people who truly care about me. I would bail on group plans sometimes cause I wasn't feeling good (depression and anxiety taking their toll) and I'd be so confused when they were upset I didn't come along. I'm still surprised and even kind of confused when people call me to hang out during the day. I've started realizing how horribly unhealthy it is that I am essentially shocked people want to see me or tell me they'll miss me when I leave and want me to move back because they can't imagine not having me in their life. I seriously need to fucking friends back home so I can start to shake these crippling feelings of inadequacy I didn't even realize I had.

I am exactly like this. I'll have a wonderful day with people, we all head home, sometimes I'm even feeling tired and antisocial by the end of the hanging out, then once I'm home I feel so lonely and shitty but too shitty to want to be around anyone so I just spiral into their weird, horrible sadness. It is happening now actually, and I hate it.

I am also a girl who has mostly guy friends, or at least prefers the company of my guy friends to hanging out with just girls. My girl friends aren't even catty at all, I just don't click with them the same way I do with guys. I have had very little drama with any of my friends, and any drama normally is not that big of a deal and blows over with a little time and discussing. So I definitely hate this idea of girls who hang with guys are bitchy drama-causers.

I try incredibly hard to not judge people on their actions unless it becomes a reoccuring thing. A lot of people have trouble understanding how I can forgive people and keep hanging out with them when they fuck me over, but often they only fuck me over that one time and after we have a good talk about it it becomes clear that they just fucked up and aren't actually complete pieces of shit.

I (female) punch my male room mates or my dad sometimes, just fucking around, and the closest I've ever gotten to causing them actual pain is "Eh, yea that kinda hurt, good job!" though they always still threaten to punch me back until I run away. But I would NEVER hit a guy out of anger because even if I know I'm not going to cause any damage the fact that he can't do anything in response without seeming like a woman beater is kinda disturbing to me. I can't stand watching girls slap or hit their boyfriends then flip out when the guy retaliates in even the least violent of ways, it makes me sick.